


zenith

by besselfcn



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Assassination Attempt(s), Hospitals, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Semi-graphic description of gunshot wounds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-18 20:04:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14859360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: They keep telling him Jack’s lucky.





	zenith

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [crookedfingers](http://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedfingers/) for encouraging the production of this. You're welcome, Crook. Sorry, Crook.

Later, he remembers it in fragments. Like the jagged edges of shattered glass.

\---

“I look stupid.”

Gabriel sits up from Jack’s bed on his elbows. “So?” he says. “You always look stupid.”

Jack scowls. “Very fucking funny.”

Back to messing with his tie, then. As if _that’s_ the worst part of the outfit. Not the gaudy patches and medals affixed to his collar; not the dress shoes that shine so brightly that it’s obvious the man’s never worn them a day in his life; not the half-vest-half-cape abomination he drapes over himself like a security blanket.

Definitely the tie.

“You look fine,” Gabriel sighs. He drags himself out of bed to stand behind Jack as he looks in the mirror. He loops his hands around to fix the tie, digging his chin into Jack’s shoulder until Jack shrugs him off.

“You _just_ told me I look stupid.”

“Mmhmm,” Gabriel agrees. He grazes his teeth against Jack’s neck as he pulls the tie tight. “In a kitschy way. Charming. Makes for a great public figure.”

Jack shrugs him off altogether and affixes him with what Gabriel’s sure is meant to be a stern look. “You’re not helping.”

“You didn’t ask for my help.”

“Yeah, I know better than that.”

“Well, then what are you complaining about?”

Jack sighs. It’s one of his deep, warbled sighs, where his whole body slouches with it. And so Gabriel takes Jack’s face in his hands, fingertips firm under his chin but thumbs gentle against his cheekbones.

“Hey,” he says. “You’re gonna do fine.”

Jack nods, quick. “It’s a big fucking deal, Gabe.”

“I know.”

“UN’s watching.”

“Jack, I know.”

He chews his lip. Gabriel lets go of him slowly, like releasing a cagey animal.

“Don’t let me fuck this up,” Jack says, in his Strike-Commander voice.

Gabriel laughs. “Oh, whatever.”

\---

“Gabriel. Gabriel. Gabriel, wake up.”

He jolts awake, feet crashing down onto the floor, arms reaching out to grasp the sides of the chair while his heart leaps up to his throat and he looks around for who and what and where--

It’s Angela. Standing at the foot of Jack’s bed. And Jack’s still asleep--no, unconscious. Comatose. Alive.

“Morning?” Gabriel slurs. He rolls his neck and feels every joint shudder and crack.

“Not quite,” Angela says. “Oh-two-hundred.” She must catch him glancing at Jack with a hint of fear behind it, because she adds, “He’s fine. Nothing different. I just thought perhaps you’d like to move to a cot.”

Gabriel blinks at her.

She gestures to the collapsible bed in the corner of Jack’s room.

“No,” he says, and ignores Angela’s look of concern. “No, I’m fine. I uh. I shouldn’t have fallen asleep. I’m fine.”

“Gabriel.”

“I’m _fine._ ”

Angela taps her fingers against the bedframe. “You know,” she says, “saying it more times doesn’t make it true.”

“Ange.”

“And keeping vigil next to him doesn’t make him heal faster.”

They stare at each other for a long moment. Gabriel can hear the beeping of a heart monitor; the soft and mechanical breathing of a respirator; the blood pounding in his ears.

“Get some rest,” Angela says.

Gabriel folds himself back into the chair, joints protesting as he does. “You too.”

\---

“Male, thirty-four years old, gunshot wound to the chest, probable collapsed lung, lost a lot of blood already, we need prep him for surgery--sir, you can’t come back here; sir--sir, _stop_ , we will let you know as soon as he’s stable, okay?”

\---

“You want a drink?”

Jack’s face is stone-steady as he watches Gabriel pour out the two glasses of champagne. “No,” he says.

“Fine,” Gabriel shrugs, and throws back one flute, then the other. “Aw, don’t give me that look. Not all of us get to ride in the limo every day, did you know that? I’ll take the free booze where I can get it.”

“It’s not free,” Jack grumbles, and Gabriel grins, because Jack can’t ever resist this lecture. “Overwatch pays for it. Which means I pay for it. Which means you’re drinking my fucking booze.”

“Mm,” Gabriel. “ _L’etat c’est moi._ ”

“Shut up.” But he’s smiling.

Gabriel pours himself another glass. Jack takes the opportunity, apparently, to reach into his coat pocket and pull out his notecards. Starts rifling through them without reading them; just to have something to do with his hands.

Jack doesn’t get _nervous_ before public speeches like this, exactly. It’s not stage fright or a dislike of public speaking or anything like that, it’s just… going cold. Folding in on himself, putting himself away for however long it takes. Standing up in front of a crowd to be the poster boy of an international peacekeeping organization requires him to put Jack Morrison on the backburner, at least for the afternoon.

It makes Gabriel feel something he can only approximate to be anger.

“Listen,” Gabriel sighs, and puts the champagne flute back in its stupid little velvet holder. “I know you fuckin’ hate speech days. I also fuckin’ hate speech days. But when you’re done, we’ll climb back into Overwatch’s fancy little car, and we’ll drink Overwatch’s booze, and I’ll let Overwatch’s boy suck me off.”

Jack’s mouth twitches, the only hint of a crack in the facade.

“Oh, you’ll _let_ me?” he asks, leaning forward.

“Mm-hmm,” Gabriel responds. “I’ll let you.”

“How generous.”

“Well, anything for the Strike-Commander.”

“ _Mon Dieu_ ,” comes Gerard’s voice from the other side of the partition. “Could you two at least _pretend_ to be decent?”

\---

Jack’s been out for three days.

Gabriel tries to parse that knowledge in his head. Three days. Jack’s been unconscious, hooked to machines, for three days. Seventy-two hours; no, short of that. He checks the time. Sixty-eight. 

Sixty-eight hours since Jack took a fucking 50 cal to the chest. Gabriel could rattle off his injuries in his sleep at this point, he’s read the chart so many times. 6 shattered ribs. Broken sternum. Collapsed lung. Torn pericardium. Punctured left atrium and ventricle. Grazed ascending aorta.

Gabriel has, more than once, pulled the sheets down from Jack’s chest and taken stock of the injuries there. Couldn’t touch, at first. Just stared at the sick, deep-purple bruises that blossom across the entirety of his chest. The staples through his skin that keep him stitched together like a hasty sewing job. The bandages that weep red and yellow and brown that have to be changed twice a day as his body fights to stitch itself back up, to stay alive, come on, come on, stay alive--.

Now, when no one is around, he runs his fingers around the edges of the bruising. From where it spreads nearly up to his neck down, down, down to the edges of his abs. The compression from the armor, they say, mixed with the internal bleeding. It’ll last a while.

And they keep telling him Jack’s lucky.

If he weren’t wearing that kind of body armor, he’d be dead. If it had been a millimeter to the right, he’d be dead. If he didn’t have the enhanced healing, the failsafes against circulatory shock, the bioengineering that stitches him back together, bit by bit.

If he wasn’t Jack Morrison, they keep trying to tell him, then he’d be dead.

If he wasn’t Jack Morrison, Gabriel thinks, he wouldn’t have gotten shot.

\---

From his place towards the back of the stage, Gabriel watches Jack set up at the podium. The harsh lines of his shoulders, cable-tight, are at least smoothed out by that awful coat. He watches Jack sort through the note cards again, like he’s going to use them this time, maybe. Like he’s ever not had a speech memorized soup to nuts.

“Thank you all so much for joining us here today,” Jack starts, clear and booming, and as the silence falls over the crowd Gabriel comfortably tunes Jack out.

He scans the people and the buildings for something interesting to look at for the next half hour. Better than standing stock-still in an itchy suit and listening to Jack drone on. There’s usually at least someone in the crowd who looks bored, or tired, or confused--these people who can’t bring themselves to care that they’re watching the Strike-Commander speak. Those are the ones Gabriel can make up a story for--why are they here? Who do they come to these things for? Jack? Themselves? Someone they care about? What story do they have, behind those frustrated stares?

Gabriel’s halfway through concocting a narrative about a woman with a child on her shoulders, pulled away to watch the speech because her husband is some sort of fanatic, some washed-up military vet--when the hair on the back of his neck starts to stand up.

Call it instinct; call it the Program; call it the way Gabriel’s always been. Whatever it is, he knows suddenly that something is _wrong_.

He scans the crowd again--this time for anger, for anxiety, for grief. There is nothing there that he can see, nothing the security detail on the ground wouldn’t catch. The buildings behind them are clear, the windows empty. The stage is the same as it ever was, and a glance at Gerard tells him the man suspects nothing.

He lifts his gaze to the rooftops, to the skyline--

To the tall buildings behind the front--

To the dark shape that he can just barely see, on the corner of a sksycraper--

“ _Jack!_ ”

Jack doesn’t hesitate; he turns to get to cover--but the shot--

\---

He hears it in his dreams. The heart monitor. The blaring of the sirens. The ricochet.

\---

The gasps and screams erupt in the crowd as Jack rocks back on his heels.

Gabriel feels frozen--knows his body is moving towards Jack even as he is looking towards the shooter, watching them taken out swiftly and mercilessly by their own counter-snipers--but he can’t feel it, can only imagine himself rooted in place, a heavy and dull and useless thing, and Jack.

Jack.

He turns from the podium and takes a step and a stupid, ridiculous part of Gabriel’s brain thinks, _his body armor stopped the shot; he’s fine; he’s okay_.

He takes another. His shirt is ripped; there’s a hole that bores through him, through him, through him.

“Get the car,” Gabriel shouts, and he catches Jack as he collapses, shaking, blood welling through his armor, his shirt, over Gabriel’s useless hands as he presses them against Jack’s chest and thinks, _no_.

\---

“Well,” Ana sighs. She runs her fingers through Jack’s hair. “At least he’s getting some sleep.”

Gabriel scoffs. “Yeah,” he agrees, and finds his voice scratchier than he thought it should be. “He needs his beauty sleep.”

It’s the dawn after the shooting and Jack didn’t die in the night, and fuck, that’s something. Angela had convinced him to go home and shower a few hours ago; when he’d come back, Ana had been here. Looking like she’d scrubbed herself clean until her skin turned pink.

Ana sinks down into the chair Gabriel had started to think of as _his_ chair; she seems to know this by instinct, and puts her feet up on Jack’s bed as she makes herself comfortable.

“Can’t smoke in here, I assume,” she says dryly. Gabriel leans against the bedframe, careful not to touch Jack’s legs.

“Thought you quit,” he says.

She nods slowly. “Yeah, well,” she murmurs. “Trust Jack to get me started again.”

Gabriel watches her close her eyes. There is no restfulness behind the gesture, no pretense that she is calm. Just a smoldering fire in her chest.

“I should have seen him,” she says.

“Ana.”

“No,” she demands, a hand up. He shuts his mouth. “I should have seen him, Gabriel.”

He hangs his head. Because, fuck, what do you say to that? What do you say when you both know she’s right?

“I got sloppy,” she snarls. “Thought he was safe because it was a fucking formality speech. I should’ve--fucking hell. Fuck. _Fuck_.”

She doubles over, heels of her palms pressing into her eyes. Gabriel studies the edge of the Horus tattoo. He feels like if he looks at anything else he might fly apart.

“This can’t happen again,” Ana says suddenly, standing. She balls her hands into fists; Gabriel stands straight and tall. “This _won’t_ happen again.”

“Okay.”

“I won’t let it.”

“Okay.”

She scrutinizes him. He lets her.

“Do you still trust me?” she asks, and she’s never sounded less like herself.

Gabriel’s heart hammers in his chest. Christ. Does he still trust her. He sees her when he closes his eyes. When he looks at Jack. When he thinks about the crumpled body on the rooftop, the time between the shot and the response. When he thinks about what a second shot would’ve done.

“Ana,” Gabriel says. “Fucking hell. Go get some sleep and stop asking stupid questions.”

She punches him on the arm without hesitation; but her face relaxes, and then tenses again, like settling back into place.

“He’ll be fine,” Ana says as she leaves. “You hear me, Morrison? You’ll be fine.”

 

\---

“Jack,” Angela is saying, leaned over him on the floor of the limousine, and everything is clattering, and Gabriel’s hands are streaked with blood, and he doesn’t know how there’s so much of it. “Jack, can you hear me? Can you talk to me?”

And there’s a sucking noise, like a balloon deflating, and oh, God, he’s trying to breathe, and all there is is red foam, and Gabriel’s head is full of cotton--

\---

Gabriel runs his fingers, shaking, through Jack’s hair. It’s gone all thick with oil, the way it does when Jack forgets to shower. Someone needs to wash it.

\---

Jack’s mother calls when he’s in the waiting room; he picks up, he thinks, and talks to her. He tells her what he knows. He tells her he doesn’t know anything yet. He can’t remember anything beyond that.

He didn’t even know Jack gave her his number.

\---

He wrings out a washcloth in the bathroom sink; fucking shitty hospital towels, all rough and patchy from a hundred too many bleachings. Water runs warm, at least. Not too hot, but warm, a soothing touch against the skin.

\---

“He’s crashing,” Angela says, like it’s anyone, like it’s not unthinkable. “How far to the hospital?”

“Two minutes.”

“Make it faster.”

Gabriel leans harder against Jack’s chest, feels bone crack and shift under his palms, and he doesn’t care, can’t care, can feel blood seeping now into his knees and when the car rattles it sounds like Jack is drowning and Gabriel cannot see the surface.

\---

With no soap all the washcloth does is smear the oil around, but it’s better than nothing, maybe. Feels better than nothing.

He finishes wiping down half of Jack’s hair before the washcloth starts to feel cold. He pulls it away abruptly and just--watches Jack breathe. Rise and fall. In and out.

He goes back to the bathroom to wet the cloth again.

\---

_“Gabriel,” someone says, and he doesn’t know whether he’s on stage. Whether he’s in the waiting room. In Jack’s hospital room. In a dream._

_“Gabriel,” they say, like they care, like they understand, and he cries._

\---

“Hey.”

Gabriel drops the dampened washcloth.

Jack looks at him-- _looks at him_ \--with dull eyes and a sallow face but a smile, shaky as it is.

“You fucking asshole,” Gabriel breathes, and strides back over to the bed, grips Jack’s hand in his and he knows it must bruise but fuck it, fuck it.

“Hey,” Jack rasps, again. “Told you. Speech went fine.”

Gabriel laughs until his chest hurts.

\---

He feels--

He feels.

He doesn’t know what to think about this. About any of it, yet. There are things he _should_ feel, probably--like guilt, or shame, or concern. But he doesn’t.

And there are things he shouldn’t be, which are easier to point out. Probably shouldn’t be fucking one of the new Program recruits. Probably shouldn’t be letting him spend the night in his bed. Probably shouldn’t be tracing fingers over the curve of his hips in the morning light, like some god-awful portrait of domesticity.

But, hey. When has he ever done what he’s meant to.

“We’re supposed to get up soon,” Morrison grumbles, like it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.

Gabriel hums. He catches his mouth in a crushing kiss.

“Fuck,” Morrison breathes, rolling his hips.

“Sure,” Gabriel says. “If we make it fast.”

Morrison bites his lip. Christ, does he look young like that. Like he’s fresh out of basic.

“Nah,” he says, and slaps Gabriel on the ass as he stands, such an irreverent display that Gabriel is actually stunned for a moment. “C’mon. Breakfast is soon, and I want time to actually fuckin’ digest it.”

Gabriel rolls his eyes. He watches Morrison wander over to the bathroom; only when that freckled ass is out of sight does he tear his gaze away.

He dresses quickly, like the chore it is. When he goes to throw his dog tags on over the uniform, he has to pick up both sets on the bedside table and read them to see whose is whose; loops the correct one around his neck while still running his thumb over the details of the other.

“Catholic?” Gabriel calls out. “Seriously?”

Morrison peeks his head out from the bathroom as he’s washing his hands. “Hmm?” he asks, before noticing the tags. “Oh, yeah. Kinda. I guess.”

“You guess?”

Morrison wanders over. He plucks the tags out of Gabriel’s hands and loops them around his neck, still buck-ass naked otherwise. “Sure, I guess,” he says. “My mom is. Dad was. Would make her happy to see me get all the rites and shit, so. They asked me what to stamp on there and I told them.”

Gabriel laughs. “That’s pretty fuckin’ Catholic of you.”

Morrison stares at him for a second. Then his face splits in that untouchable grin.

“Well,” he says, and falls back onto the bed. “You know what they say about foxholes.”

\---

 _Jack_ , Angela is saying, _hold on, you’re okay, just hold on_.

There is blood caked under Gabriel’s fingernails, there is blood across the front of his collar, there is blood soaking through Jack’s skin and shirt and tie.

It is too much. It is not survivable. It is impossible.

Gabriel imagines Jack dying and something ancient and childlike and helpless rises in his chest.

 _Our Father_ , recites his mind. _Who art in heaven. Hallowed be Thy name._

**Author's Note:**

> Find me cross-platform @besselfcn.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] zenith](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15103286) by [synteis_records (synteis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/synteis/pseuds/synteis_records)




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